Millions of video-game fans crashed the Web site of Sony’s PlayStation early yesterday when they tried to place the first advance orders for the upgraded system.

The 128-bit PlayStation 2 goes on sale in Japan on March 4 – and won’t be available in the U.S. until late in the year – but the company planned to start taking orders on its playstation.com site after midnight, Tokyo time, yesterday.

Instead, the site was swamped with about 500,000 hits a minute and went down for two hours, said Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi.

“The orders were beyond our imagination. We are doing our utmost to get the site back up,” he told reporters.

The PlayStation 2, which can play compact discs and has a digital video-disc player that allows users to play movies, is more powerful than the current PlayStation, the world’s top-selling system.

Sony started selling PlayStation in Japan in December 1994 and has sold more than 72 million consoles, surpassing rivals Sega and Nintendo.

Meanwhile, a glitch in a computer cable froze the Nasdaq composite index for about 2 ½ hours yesterday, leaving investors clueless about the direction and movement of the technology-saturated market.

The problem was in a cable connected to a mainframe computer at Nasdaq’s technical center in Trumbull, Conn., a Nasdaq spokesman said.